Follow PR Daily on:

Making the most of your brand’s Wikipedia page

If students writing term papers are any indication, Wikipedia is one of the first resources people turn to when trying to get a feel for a topic or a company.

The same holds true for many journalists, industry analysts, and other influencers. Though it’s too infrequently considered a communications priority, a company’s Wikipedia page isn’t something that should be left to Wikipedia community editors.

In case you didn’t know, anyone can edit Wikipedia. (That’s both wonderful and scary.) The website doesn’t ask for account registration before allowing someone to do so. Before embarking on any Wikipedia edits, remember that Wikipedia prides itself on letting community forces drive content to a neutral point of view on any given topic. As a result, verifiability and citing reliable sources are crucial to developing a well-regarded Wikipedia page doesn’t get flagged as having too much “marketing speak.”

Still think it’s a good idea to include a few marketing statements? Think again—just as anyone can edit a page, anyone can flag a page that reads like an advertisement.

Read on for a primer of Wikipedia best practices that Bhava uses to help clients build out a strong presence on the world’s favorite online encyclopedia.

Building a Wikipedia page for a company from scratch

First, do a search on the company and see whether it has a Wikipedia page. If it does, then you can directly edit that page. If no Wikipedia page pops up for that company, you can create a page. This step is done simply from the returned search results page.

Building the actual content is trickier. To help with style questions, Wikipedia has shared a comprehensive style guide.

Citations

Wikipedia’s guidelines state:

“In particular, sources are required for material that is challenged or likely to be challenged—if reliable sources cannot be found for challenged material, it is likely to be removed from the article. Sources are also required when quoting someone, with or without quotation marks, or closely paraphrasing a source. However, the citing of sources is not limited to those situations—editors are always encouraged to add or improve citations for any information contained in an article.”

With company pages, any claim that is not verified by a third party has the potential to be called into question by anyone ranging from competitors to a 13-year-old on a justice rant.

To guard against such challenges, Bhava recommends weaving together quotes from published articles to tell the larger company story, carefully citing each sentence back to the original article. Backlinks to independent blogs tend not to carry too much weight when put through the verification test. Working with a PR team can help generate those published stories that make for strong Wikipedia references, emphasizing the vital importance of integrating good public relations strategy in your overall communications plan.

Editing an existing Wikipedia page to include company perspective

Extensive, abrupt changes to a Wikipedia page will raise a flag for Wikipedia’s army of bots. So, if a company page already exists, be careful about excessive editing. You can reframe and guide a page, but not raze it and rebuild it. It’s OK to add new material or revise content that needs to be updated since a previous edit and then reorder the page where necessary to place emphasis on facts and events you would like to prioritize.

Whatever you do, don’t just delete that flag. What you do next requires finesse.

First, start by going through the text, sentence by sentence, highlighting each unsubstantiated claim. For each loose statement, find corroborating support from third-party materials. It’s useful to go through media coverage of a launch, grabbing tidbits from press releases that reporters have repurposed, as well as original commentary or analyst opinions. After you validate each statement through these references, your work is done. You can remove the code at the top of the editing box that flags an article, and save the page.

Ongoing Wikipedia management

It’s not enough to create a company page and then let the Wikipedia community speak for your company. Here at Bhava, we believe it’s important for companies to play a proper role in the accuracy and completeness of their Wikipedia page, adding content with each relevant announcement and compelling milestone. Important hires, product announcements, and media and analyst coverage should all be considered fodder for ongoing Wikipedia updates.

Kate Frost is an account manager at Bhava Communications. A version of this story originally ran on the agency's blog.